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Thursday, April 21, 2016

Charles and I wound up watching a “B” movie from RKO in 1933
I’d recorded off Turner Classic Movies when I could still record TV shows
before Cox’s accursed “all-digital” conversion made that impossible: Lucky
Devils, a quirky story that begins with a
brilliant and surprisingly violent sequence that’s oddly brutal for a 1933
movie, even one made during the relatively loose “pre-Code” era. It’s a bank
robbery, but one in which both the robbers themselves and the people in the
bank they’re robbing — especially the bank’s security people — seem to be more
interested in inflicting the maximum death toll on each other than the
priorities that usually apply in a situation like this. (Usually bank robbers
want to do as little mayhem as possible — their objective is loot, not carnage
— and bank employees are told to stay calm, go along with the robbers, wait
until they’ve got away and it’s safe, and then call the police.) In the middle
of a lot of spectacular action, we get a pull-back and find that this is taking
place on a movie set and what we’ve seen is a bank-robbery sequence being shot for a film. Then we’re introduced to our
principals, stunt people Skipper Clark (William Boyd — the one who later played
Hopalong Cassidy, not the William
“Stage” Boyd whose scandalous antics got the other William Boyd fired by RKO under the morals clause in
his contract, seemingly ruining his career until Paramount signed him to do the
Hoppy movies and Boyd insisted on the TV rights to them, which made him a
fortune when they were reissued to TV in the early 1950’s) and Bob Hughes
(William Gargan). After work ends for the day Skipper and Bob hang out at a bar
that seems to cater mostly to stunt people (“A stunt person’s bar?” Charles
asked incredulously), though one of the other patrons is Fran Whitley (Dorothy
Wilson), who’s run out of money after an attempt to crack Hollywood as an
aspiring actress and is about to commit suicide when Skipper and Bob realize
what’s happening and rescue her. (A sign reading “HOLLYWOOD” is blinking in the
background as she prepares to jump off the building’s balcony into the
Hollywood canyon below, and both I and an imdb.com contributor thought the
scene might have been inspired by the then-recent suicide of minor actress Peg
Entwistle, who’d killed herself by jumping off the Hollywood sign following a
similarly failed attempt to make it as an actress — though she did get at least
one credit in RKO’s abysmal Thirteen Women, a movie so bad a lot of jokesters in Hollywood said that anybody who’d been in it would have been so embarrassed it
wasn’t surprising at all that one would kill herself.) They let her stay with
them, and of course there’s a romantic-triangle rivalry in which Fran thinks
Skipper is taking her out just to warn her away from Bob, but in fact Skipper
wants her for himself. This leads him to break one of the cardinal rules of
stunt person-dom: don’t get married, because if you do you’ll have another
person (or two or more, quite likely, especially given the penchant of women in
movies to get pregnant the very first time they have sex) in your life to care
about and you’ll lose your edge, get worried, get careless and die.

We’ve
actually seen this happen to Slugger Jones (William Bakewell, playing a minor
role just two years after he was billed ahead of Clark Gable in the 1931 MGM
film Dance, Fools, Dance with
Joan Crawford) — yes, this is one of those bizarre movies in which the writers
(Casey Robinson and real-life stunt person Bob Rose, “original” story; Agnes
Christine Johnson and Ben Markson, screenplay) give the male characters silly
nicknames like Skipper, Slugger and Happy to indicate how butch they are — in
the bar scene, in which Slugger introduces his pals to the woman he’s about to
marry, Doris (Julie Haydon), and we just know that as soon as they get married Slugger is going to
screw up a stunt and it’s going to kill him and leave her an instant widow — a pregnant instant widow, this being a movie (and one produced,
ironically, by David O. Selznick, who later in a memo during the preparation of
Gone with the Wind lampooned
“these infallible pregnancies at single contacts”). The stunt is a scene in a
gangster movie in which he’s supposed to be driving a car in a chase scene and
sideswipe a lamp-post; instead, on the first take he misses the lamp-post
altogether and the second one he crashes the car into the lamp-post, sending it through a plate-glass
window in a storefront set and killing himself. (In 1933 a “glass” window on an
outdoor set, especially if it were supposed to break as part of the action, was
usually made of spun sugar precisely so anyone crashing through it wouldn’t get hurt by shards of glass.) This example doesn’t
stop Skipper and Fran from tying the knot, though the film dramatizes another
stunt people’s superstition — if one of the stunt people breaks a bottle the
night before, it means someone will get killed on the set the next day. Skipper
and Fran accidentally break a bottle the night before their friend Happy (Bruce
Cabot) is supposed to do a difficult stunt — he’s playing a firefighter who’s
supposed to swing over to the building on the other side of the backlot
“street” and rescue a police officer (played by Bob) from the building before
it collapses (and there’s a marvelous shot from director Ralph Ince showing
that the “buildings” are just false fronts — it’s well-known now that movie sets are built that way but not many
moviegoers realized that in 1933).

Once again, as with the earlier scene, it
appears that a lot of the dodges real-life moviemakers used in 1933 to minimize
the potential damage to life and limb from doing a scene like this aren’t being
used in the film-within-a-film, “Right Living” by director Hacket (Alan
Roscoe), depicted as an unfeeling bastard who doesn’t care how many lives he
has to sacrifice to get the big action scenes he wants). Hacket has his effects
people actually set fire to the building that’s supposed to burn (wouldn’t it
have been safer to do it with a model and patch it in with a process screen?
Maybe not, given how awful the process work is throughout this movie; though
ace cinematographer Vernon Walker is credited with the special effects — and that, not “trick shots,” is the actual term used on his
credit — the process shots look incredibly phony and it’s hard to believe this
movie was being shot on the same lot at the same time as the magnificent and
still convincing effects film King Kong) and Happy’s gloves stick on the rope he’s supposed to be swinging
from and he dies. Hacket insists on shooting the scene again the next day and
hires Skipper to take Happy’s place — only Fran, who wants her husband to get
out of stunt work because it’s too risky, picks exactly the wrong time to make
her point. She crashes the set just when Skipper is about to do the stunt, and
her presence jars off his timing and he does the swing too late to catch Bob,
who takes a plunge into the fire. Fortunately Bob survives with only minor
injuries, but Skipper is now considered unemployable as a stunt person and, in
a grim montage sequence that looks more like something from a Warner Bros. film
than anything we expect from RKO (though if Warners had been making this, James Cagney would have been
playing Skipper and Pat O’Brien would have been playing Bob!), he’s unable to
find any other sort of work either. Eventually he lands a job on the labor gang
(i.e., the carpenters who build sets) for another Hacket picture, this one set
against a waterfall and featuring a climactic stunt sequence involving a person
taking a boat over the waterfall and hopefully surviving. Hacket offers $100 to
whoever will do this stunt, his assistant director ups the ante to $200, but
there are no takers … until Skipper receives a telegram from Dr. Leith, the $25
medical man he hired to take care of his pregnant wife Fran and deliver her
baby (is it that big a surprise that he knocked her up as soon as he had sex with her?), that
complications have set in and he needs $200 to put Fran in a hospital.

If
you’ve seen more than about six movies in your life you’ll know what happens
next: Skipper talks Hacket into letting him do the supposedly lethal stunt,
survives it, then he and Bob get into Skipper’s car and race down the mountain
from the location to the city so they can get the money to Fran’s doctor so she
can have her baby in a hospital. Only they (or the real stunt people who were doubling for William Boyd and
William Gargan playing stunt
people!) crash the car halfway down the mountain and Gargan tricks one of the
motorcycle cops who were chasing them and that allows Boyd to steal the cop’s
motorcycle (the nameplate “Harley-Davidson” is clearly visible on its gas tank,
by the way) and use it to ride
the rest of the way into town. Lucky Devils is a good movie on its own terms — Ince stages the
action well and the characterizations are breezily entertaining in a way you
didn’t often get in similar RKO attempts to poach on Warners’ territory — and
the only defect in it is how relentlessly predictable it is. Throughout the
film you seem to be about a reel or two ahead of the writers (for Robinson and
Rose to take credit for an “original” story seems even more of a perversion of
language than usual!), and every time you think, “I know where this is going,” it duly goes there. No wonder
Robinson later on got so persnickety about not taking credit for any scripts
except the ones he wrote entirely by himself — even though that cost him a
share of the Academy Award for Casablanca, for which he wrote the love scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid
Bergman but didn’t qualify to share the award because he’d declined credit.

Last night I went to the “Vintage Sci-Fi” monthly film
screening in Golden Hill, where they were showing three episodes from the
surprisingly compelling early-1960’s science-fiction anthology TV series The
Outer Limits. The show had a great
introduction I still remember from my childhood (though I really wasn’t old
enough when it first aired to appreciate the show itself): an announcer called
the “Control Voice” told us that for the next hour “we” would be taking control
of our TV set, and we shouldn’t attempt to adjust the horizontal or vertical
controls (younger readers will have no idea that back in the 1960’s you had horizontal or vertical controls on TV’s and you
frequently had to adjust them to prevent the picture from jumping
uncontrollably) because they were going to control what we saw until the hour
was up, whereupon the same voice announced, “We now return control of your
television set to you.” For the first season the show-runner of The
Outer Limits was Joseph Stefano, who at the
time had just done the screenplay (based on Robert Bloch’s novel) for Alfred
Hitchcock’s film Psycho. It was
Stefano who made one of the crucial decisions in the success of that movie;
instead of making the killer a middle-aged nerd (anyone who reads Bloch’s Psycho will probably come to the conclusion that he was basing Norman Bates
at least in part on his good friend H. P. Lovecraft) he would be a young,
attractive man who would have a surface charm and be a psycho killer only
underneath. Stefano wrote and produced the first episode shown last night, “The
Zanti Misfits.”

It takes place in the California desert and deals with aliens
from the planet Zanti, who have decided that since they cannot execute their
most dastardly criminals — their moral sense prevents it — and they’re running
out of room to incarcerate them on their home planet, they’ve decided to land
some of them on Earth and set up a Zantian penal colony in an abandoned ghost
town called “Morgue.” A scientist named Dr. Stephen Grave (Michael Tolan) is
assigned to work with the military in general, and General Maximillian R. Hart
(Robert F. Simon) and Major Robert Hill (Claude Woolman) in particular, to
clear out a space for the Zanti to set up their extra-planetary prison and have
the absolute privacy they want, unencumbered by any pesky human looky-loos.
Unfortunately, two pesky human looky-loos crash through the security gate and
run down the soldier who was supposed to be patrolling it, killing him. The two
are escaped criminal Ben Garth (a young and barely recognizable Bruce Dern —
who, like Stefano, was also Hitchcock-connected: he had a small but crucial
role in the flashback sequence that ends Marnie and he would star in Hitchcock’s last film, Family
Plot) and his girlfriend Lisa Lawrence
(Olive Deering), who left her husband to run away with Ben because she thought
a run on the wild side would be fun and exciting. Instead she’s lost in the
middle of the desert in an overheated car that can’t be used because all its
radiator water has boiled away and there’s nowhere to get any more, and as if
that isn’t bad enough she’s forced to clamber around the desert rocks (“played”
by the Vasquez Rocks north of Los Angeles, site of a million “B” Westerns and
sci-fi films) in high-heeled shoes, which she quickly removes à la Marlene Dietrich at the end of Morocco. Ben tries to escape and is cornered by one of the
Zantians, who turn out to be nine-inch long insects that seem to be the result
of a cross between a tarantula and a wingless bee; they’re crudely manufactured
(it looks like the prop department made them out of pipe cleaners and
Styrofoam) and with risible heads that are supposed to look sinister. They’re a
good deal more frightening when we see them in silhouette than when they’re
shown full-face — suggesting that Stefano and his director, Leonard Horn, might
have been better off going the Val Lewton route, never showing the beasties full-on and using shadows and
sound effect to hint at their
sinister presence.

Instead one of the Zantians, flush with having killed Ben,
turns on Lisa — and Dr. Grave, who volunteered to go out to the desert and try
to re-establish communication with the Zantians (they cut off ties to the
Earthlings when Ben and Lisa showed up and they figured Earth’s military was
reneging on its promise to leave them alone), bashes the Zantian to death with
a convenient boulder. It turns out that the one he killed was the “Regent,” the
Zantian commander responsible for keeping order among the prisoners — and
without him the Zantian cons are ready to make their escape. They fly the
Zantian spaceship out of the protected zone and the military people realize
it’s now out of range for them to be able to destroy it — their fallback plan
in case anything went wrong. Instead the Zantians escape en masse and the U.S. crew have to kill them by any means
available — shooting them, clubbing them, ultimately massacring them with
flamethrowers. Then there’s a tag line containing the sort of surprise twist
not only this but virtually every
sci-fi TV series in the early days, including Tales of Tomorrow and The Twilight Zone, insisted on: the Earth base personnel get a message
from Zanti (automatically translated into English, like the previous messages
from the Zantian ship, from the Zantian language by their big mainframe
computer) explaining that the death of all the Zantian convicts at the
Earthlings’ hands was exactly the result the Zantians in charge back home wanted. It seems they’d studied Earth’s history and
realized what efficient killers of our own species we are, and so they figured
they’d send their own “misfits,” including a so-called “Regent” who was getting
a bit too drunk with power for the Zantians to feel safe having him around
their own planet, and we’d provoke a quarrel with them that would end up with
us knocking them off en masse and
therefore eliminating them in a way the Zantians themselves couldn’t (or
wouldn’t) do. It’s a neat, if rather obvious, little moral to wrap up a quite
well-written and suspenseful show, even though some of Lisa Lawrence’s dialogue
was pretty preposterous (particularly when she says, “I’m not afraid to die”),
and while others at the screening were criticizing her for overacting, I said,
“It’s not that — it’s that Joseph Stefano didn’t have Alfred Hitchcock around
to tell him he was over-writing!”

The other two (or three, since one of them, “The
Inheritors,” was a two-part show and both parts were shown) episodes of The
Outer Limits shown last night were both
from the second season, in which Ben Brady replaced Joseph Stefano (who’d
feuded with the honchos at ABC, where the show aired — and whose programs were
so chronically poorly rated that later in the 1960’s a joke around Hollywood
went, “You know how to end the Viet Nam war? Just put it on ABC and it’ll be
canceled in 13 weeks!”) as producer and show runner (under Leslie Stevens, a
quirky director who is credited for creating the show’s concept and who made a
number of oddball independent films, one of which was the terrible Incubus, starring William Shatner in a tale of demonic
possession filmed entirely in Esperanto — ineptly pronounced Esperanto at that)
and Harry Lubin replacing Dominic Frontiere as composer. The first
second-season episode shown was “Demon with a Glass Hand,” which has more réclame than most of the Outer Limits shows because Harlan Ellison wrote the script and
Byron Haskin (the 1953 War of the Worlds and 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars) directed. Ellison won the first of his four
Writers’ Guild best-screenplay awards for this and he later sued James Cameron
because he claimed the original 1984 film The Terminator had been ripped off of this and another Outer
Limits script he’d written called
“Soldier.” He also bitched about how “Demon with a Glass Hand” was rewritten;
at a Star Trek convention he told
one imdb.com contributor, “Imagine: creatures from a far-future century
fist-fighting and shooting at each other with pistols! Gimme a break!” (He was
similarly bitchy towards the version of his acclaimed Star Trek script “The City on the Edge of Forever” that aired;
at the Star Trek convention at
which I heard Ellison he said
that when he gave his draft screenplay to William Shatner, Shatner meticulously
and carefully counted both his and Leonard Nimoy’s lines to make sure he had
more than Nimoy, and when Ellison asked why, Shatner said, “I’ve got to have more lines than he does! I can’t compete
with those ears!”)

Whatever Ellison’s complaints (and he’s a notorious
complainer about virtually everything — when he harnesses that into his stories it actually helps him be a
great writer!) about it, “Demon with a Glass Hand” is an effective suspense
tale about a man named Trent (Robert Culp) who comes to consciousness on Earth
with no memory of his identity or his past, sort of like Robert Ludlum’s Jason
Bourne. He has a black-gloved hand which, when he peels back the glove, turns
out to be made of glass; he has a thumb and a little finger which are
components of a super-computer that apparently contains all of Earth’s
knowledge, or at least what he needs to complete his assignment, though he’s
not too clear about what that assignment is. It turns out that a thousand years
later Earth was conquered by a race from another planet called the Kyben, who
were so far ahead of us technologically they kicked our butts in just 19 days —
only just as the Kyben were about to occupy Earth and enslave its inhabitants,
all 70 million Earthlings disappeared overnight and neither the Kyben nor Trent
had any idea what happened to them. The Kyben keep sending emissaries back into
time to kill Trent before he can reassemble the missing fingers of his
gloved-hand computer, and to do this they wear gold medallions and use a giant
computer they’ve hidden somewhere in a derelict office building (“played” by
the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, so familiar a location from films
noir one expects Philip Marlowe to have his
office in it) currently occupied only by a ladies’ garment distributor and a
passport photo studio.

Trent runs into Consuelo Biros (Arlene Martel, later
Spock’s fiancée in the “Amok Time” episode of Star Trek), who’s been running the ladies’ garment business
since her husband died, and the two become collaborators — she’s attracted to
him but he insists he can’t love anyone for reasons he keeps mysterious.
Eventually he gets back the missing fingers of his computer-hand, and with the
information it provides him he locates the Kyben’s time mirror — it’s concealed
in the passport-photo office — and destroys it and the remaining Kyben that are
after him. But at the end it turns out that he isn’t a real human being; he’s a
robot, and the reason he was picked for the mission of returning to Earth’s
past and protecting the humans (whose essences were uploaded to a piece of wire
that was embedded inside Trent — when it explains this to him the computer says
that in the modern day we’re able to store sound and pictures on magnetic
media, and in the future humans will be able to store the code of their own
life forms similarly) was because he could not be permanently killed; in one scene
he was shot by the Kyben but, working from his instructions, Consuelo restored
him to full life and health … or at least functionality. The show ends with a bittersweet Third Man-style rejection scene in which Consuelo walks out on
him because she’s lost all romantic interest in him now that she knows he isn’t
human (I couldn’t help but joke, “But I’m still a good lover! The people who
made me gave me very big … uh, hands!”),
and the narrator (who doubles as the “Control Voice” that gives that chilling intro
about how “we” have taken control of your TV) explains that Trent is really a
tragic figure because he will live forever but without experiencing human
emotions, including love. It’s not all that fresh a science-fiction story (and I suspect it may
have been influenced by Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, the source for Blade
Runner), but it’s what Ellison, Haskin and
Culp do with it that makes it special — and it’s easy to see why Culp acquitted
himself so well as an action figure that his next assignment was to play a
secret agent in the TV series I Spy!

The last Outer Limits
on last night’s “Vintage Sci-Fi” program was “The Inheritors,” which despite
the absence of any major science-fiction “names” on either the writing (Ed
Adamson, Sam Neuman and Seeleg Lester) or directing (James Goldstone) credits,
proved a quite compelling story with a surprise twist that made me wish Steven
Spielberg had grabbed the remake rights and done it as a feature film. The star
here is yet another actor who, like Bruce Dern and Robert Culp, went on to
biggers and betters: Robert Duvall, playing a scientific investigator for the
“Federal Bureau of Security” named Adam Ballard, who’s investigating the
mysterious fates of four U.S. military men who were wounded in a war — it’s not
clear what war but the fact that
both the enemies and the U.S.’s principal allies are Asian and there’s a
reference to the enemies coming from the North makes it seem like an early
skirmish in Viet Nam. They were all shot in the head with a special bullet made
from a meteorite; the components are those of a normal bullet — iron and lead —
but they’ve been stacked together molecularly in a way totally beyond normal
Earth technology. The four men who’ve been wounded by these peculiar bullets
are Lt. Philip Minns (Steve Ihnat), Sgt. James Conover (Ivan Dixon, an
African-American at a time when people of color generally and Black people in
particular almost never appeared
in science-fiction shows), private first class Francis Hadley (Dee Pollock) and
private Robert Renaldo (James Frawley). When they’re in hospital photos of
their brain waves reveal two sets
of brain waves — an alien brain has superimposed its impulses on their own and
taken them over, forcing them to develop super-intelligent powers and use them
to manufacture a spaceship. Conover becomes a superb metallurgist who devises
(or discovers) an alloy far beyond anything Earth knows and a way to fasten
parts made of it together by electromagnetic impulses so they don’t need rivets
or any of the other comparatively clumsy ways Earthlings make things out of
metal. Hadley researches gases to fuel the ship and sets up a factory in
Wichita, Kansas and uses his mental powers to force the owner to sell it to him
at the price they negotiated but which the man tried to renege on; he wills the
owner to hold a gun to his own head and says his choice is either sign the
paper and let the factory go at the previously arranged price or shoot himself.
Renaldo researches the propulsion principle, which works on an anti-gravity
system similarly beyond modern Earth technology, and Mimms becomes a Wall
Street speculator, works a nest egg of $500 into a $405,000 fortune and sends
wire transfers to the other three to fund their activities.

The story plays out
as an odd combination of This Island Earth and Village of the Damned
as the Fantastic Four suddenly develop an interest in certain Earth children —
all of whom seem to be blind, deaf, crippled or otherwise disabled, and all
have been bounced around between foster homes because the system has had
trouble finding foster parents who can handle what are today euphemistically
called “special needs.” In the climax, the spaceship gets built and is readied
to take the children back to the aliens’ home planet —and [surprise!], in the plot twist that made me think this would
have been a good story for the Spielberg of the 1980’s, the aliens, whom both
Adam and we have been assuming all story had sinister, malevolent intentions,
turn out to be on the side of good. It seems that the kids can be cured of
their disabilities if they’re exposed to the aliens’ sort of atmosphere, but
will instantly gain them back once they’re taken out of it and put back into
normal Earth air. Eventually Adam and the U.S. military men let the spaceship
fly to wherever with the kids and the four soldiers who built it inside. It’s
an ending at least one imdb.com reviewer denounced as unbearably sappy — “A
group of children are targeted. They have a plethora of disabilities. One is
blind; one can’t walk; etc. They are gathered up by the brains of the outfit as
Duvall yells superlatives. It is so unrealistic that it is laughable. There are
connections here at home that would have made this such a breach of simple
decency. The writers never took into account the realities of the world,
despite the relative unfairness of them. Sludge!” — and yet I found the ending
both believable (within the conventions of science fiction) and genuinely
moving, a good though unexpected capstone to a quite intense suspense tale,
effectively directed by Goldstone and acted, especially by Duvall, Dixon and
Frawley (the latter two being the ones among the four who had twinges of
conscience about what the aliens were making them do, with Dixon’s character
taking refuge in religion and Frawley’s in alcohol).

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Two nights ago Charles and I
screened the fourth of the five Marx Brothers films at Paramount, Horse
Feathers, made in 1932 (while Laurel and
Hardy, W. C. Fields and the other great comics of the 1930’s churned out two,
three or more films per year the Marxes never made more than one a year) and
dealing — though Charles and I hadn’t realized this when we first watched it
together — with real-life scandals surrounding college football and how schools
interested in the prestige and money (both from ticket sales at games and
alumni and other public contributions) accruing from a top-tier football
program often hired out-and-out professionals, gave them phony admissions as
college students, and put them on their football teams to win. As Charles and I
watched films like College Coach
(1933), The Big Game (1936), and Saturday’s
Heroes (1937) when they came up on Turner
Classic Movies’ schedule, it became apparent that these films were dealing
seriously with the same scandals the Marx Brothers made fun of, particularly
the way pro players traveled the country and appeared at one college after
another as “students.” The Marx Brothers and their writers — Bert Kalmar and
Harry Ruby (best known as a songwriting team — Ruby wrote music, Kalmar wrote
lyrics — but surprisingly effective as screenwriters both here and in the Marx
Brothers’ next — and most audacious — film, Duck Soup), S. J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and an
uncredited Arthur Sheekman (a gag writer, specializing in snappy comebacks, who
was a friend of Groucho’s and frequently brought into Marx Brothers’ projects
to beef up Groucho’s parts) — turned the real-life football scandals of the
1930’s into a wild, frantic and screamingly funny movie in whose opening scene
the assembled faculty and students of Huxley College (named after the 19th
century British naturalist Julian Huxley, sometime collaborator and sometime
rival of Charles Darwin) are to meet their newly appointed president, Professor
Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx). When he’s told that the faculty members
and administrators have some suggestions to make about how the college should
be governed, Wagstaff snaps, “The faculty members know what they can do with
their suggestions,” and launches into a song, “I’m Against It,” which heard
today seems to sum up the attitude of Congressional Republicans towards
President Obama: “I don’t care what they have to say/It makes no difference
anyway/Whatever it is, I’m against it.” Then he segues into another song, “I
Always Get My Man,” and does some of the comic dancing that livened up many a
Marx Brothers movie. When he stops singing, Wagstaff explains, “I came to this
college to get my son out of it.” His son is Frank Wagstaff (Zeppo Marx), and
Frank explains to his dad that Huxley has had a different president every year
since 1888, “and that’s the last time we won a football game.”

Frank tells his
dad that two pro football players, Mullen (James Pierce) and MacHardie (Nat
Pendleton — so we were watching another Nat Pendleton movie just one day after
we’d seen him in Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates Come Home), hang out at a local speakeasy and would be willing
to play for Huxley … at a price. Unfortunately, by the time Wagstaff gets
there, Jennings (David Landau), a gambler who has big money placed on
arch-rival Darwin College to win the big game between it and Huxley, has
already talked to Mullen and MacHardie and signed them up to play for Darwin.
So the two people Wagstaff ends up recruiting are ice man Baravelli (Chico
Marx) and dogcatcher Pinky (Harpo Marx), about the unlikeliest football
recruits you can imagine. Of course the Marxes stop this plot, such as it is,
along the way several times so they can insert anarchic comedy sequences,
including Wagstaff’s attempts to gain admission to the speakeasy without
knowing the password — a scene that in today’s world of computer passwords is, if anything, even funnier now than it
no doubt was in 1932 — while Pinky, who like most of Harpo’s characters in the
early days managed to make not being able to speak seem like an advantage instead of a handicap, gets in by illustrating the
password, “swordfish,” by taking a dead fish and sticking a sword in its mouth.
Harpo then whirls through the speakeasy, tearing off a button from his famous
overcoat (the one that was built with secret panels inside so he could conceal
various items in it — in his introduction a homeless man comes up to him and
says, “Can you help me get a cup of coffee?,” and Harpo reaches into his coat
and pulls out a steaming hot cup of coffee — discomfiting the homeless man, who
like his confrères then and now
was most likely hoping for a handout with which he could buy booze; and later
on, in a class Wagstaff is teaching, he is solemnly warned, “Young man, as you
grow older you’ll find that you can’t burn the candle at both ends,” whereupon
Harpo pulls out of his coat a candle burning at both ends), inserting it into a
slot machine and winning a jackpot, after which he puts a coin (or a slug, or
another button, or whatever) into a pay telephone and wins a jackpot from that, too. (As much as I admire Groucho’s wisecracks and
the illustrious writers who came up with them for him, this time around I found
myself laughing harder at Harpo than at Groucho!)

In another scene, in which
Groucho is attempting to enroll Chico and Harpo into the college, he takes them
to an anatomy class in which a bored (and boring) professor (Robert Grieg) is
giving a lecture, Groucho challenges him, asking, “Is this on the level or are
you making all this stuff up?” When the official professor is driven from the
class, Groucho takes over the lecture with lines like, “The blood rushes from
the head to the feet, gets a look at those feet and rushes back to the head
again,” and “Beyond the Alps lie more Alps, and the Lord Alps those who Alp
themselves” (a line they self-plagiarized from the Marx Brothers’ first
Broadway show, the revue I’ll Say She Is), and when Harpo and Chico pelt him with pea-shooters, Groucho whips
out one of his own and fires back. There’s also the subplot of the so-called
“college widow,” Connie Bailey (Thelma Todd, in the second and last of her
films with the Marx Brothers — she was under contract to Hal Roach but he
loaned her out a lot, including
to Warners for the first version of The Maltese Falcon in 1931, in which she played Iva Archer, widow of
Sam Spade’s slain partner — the part played by Gladys George in the 1941
version with Bogart — and also tried to turn her into a comedy star in her own
right until her mysterious death in 1935). An imdb.com “trivia” poster defines
a “college widow” as “a young woman who remains near a college year after year
to associate with male students” and was thereby considered “easy.” Connie is
attracted to Zeppo — indeed, one reason Wagstaff wants to get his son out of
Huxley is he’s dating her (“Twelve years at one college?” Wagstaff tells him.
“When I was your age I went to three
colleges and fooled around with three college widows. A college widow stood for something in those days. In
fact, she stood for plenty!”) — though the other three Marxes also take their
crack at her, while she’s actually the girlfriend of Jennings (ya remember Jennings?),
the corrupt gambler who’s trying to “fix”
the big game so he can win his bets on Darwin.

There’s a bizarre sequence in
which all four Marx Brothers visit Connie’s apartment — and when Jennings shows
up Baravelli poses as her music teacher when he and Pinky aren’t busy
delivering large blocks of ice they throw out of the window after Connie says
she doesn’t want them — and for some reason in the version we were watching
this scene was photographically inferior to the rest of the movie, with long
scratches down the image and bits of dialogue lost through splices, the sort of
thing you expect from a public-domain DVD or download rather than a major film
still owned by a major studio (though not the one that produced it initially;
Paramount sold off virtually all their 1930’s and 1940’s films to MCA-TV in the
1950’s, and when MCA took over Universal in 1962 they were reissued with
Universal logos). TCM is promising to show a new digital restoration of Horse
Feathers on their next film festival, and
hopefully it will include a longer version of the scene in Connie Bailey’s
apartment that I’ve read about but never actually seen. Apparently this was
censored when the film, originally made during the so-called “pre-Code” period
of loose Production Code enforcement, was reissued after things had tightened
up — though it survived in the theatrical prints shown in Britain and British
film critic Allen Eyles described it in his book on the Marx Brothers. (Eyles
seems to be the only person among
the many authors who’ve written books about the Marx Brothers who’s actually
seen this scene; U.S. writer Joe Adamson described it in his book about the Marxes but admitted in his footnotes
that he hadn’t seen the sequence himself and was relying on Eyles’ description.)
Be that as it may, the version we got (a boxed set from Universal Home Video of
all five of the Marx Brothers’ Paramount movies) not only contained the
censored version of this scene, but a splice- and scratch-ridden version of the
censored scene at that. There’s also a bizarre scene in which Groucho is
meeting with two grey-bearded professors (Groucho himself seems to be the only
male on the Huxley faculty or staff who shaves) and debating what to do since
the college doesn’t seem to be able to afford both football and education:
“Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.” When the professors agree,
Groucho says he was just testing them — “The problem is there’s too
much football and not enough education” —
and when they agree with him again, he changes his mind again and insists he’s
going to tear down the college. “But, Professor, where will the students
sleep?” “Where they always sleep: in the classroom!” Groucho fires back.

Horse
Feathers builds to a bizarre climax in
which Wagstaff assigns Baravelli and Pinky to kidnap Mullen and MacHardie — who
kidnap them instead — leaving
them to break out by sawing through the floor of the room where they’re being
held and ending up landing on top of a bridge table being used by four elderly
women who are predictably shocked at the disruption to their card game — and,
stripped down to their underwear (Chico is wearing long johns and Harpo a
T-shirt and shorts), they commandeer a horse-drawn garbage truck (the garbage
collector picks up the garbage, puts it in a can mounted on top of a wheeled
carriage, and the horse pulls the garbage around, presumably until the can is
full and can be dumped) and ride it to the football stadium like a chariot in
what I suspect was a deliberate parody of the silent Ben-Hur. Of course, they save the game for Huxley in a
delicious sequence that makes total hash of the ordinary rules of football —
after Huxley scores a touchdown and the Marxes line up to kick the extra point
(they each kick each other in turn until the last one kicks the ball), Darwin
kicks off to Huxley instead of vice versa; and Harpo scores the winning
touchdown riding to the goal line in his garbage-can chariot (and scores again
and again and again as Chico
keeps feeding him one football after another and he makes the “touchdown”
gesture with each one), while in an even weirder tag scene Connie Bailey ends
up at the altar and Groucho, Chico and Harpo all marry her at once, then pile
on at once for the wedding night. (Zeppo is hidden behind her as this happens,
and one suspects the writers knew who the really important Marx Brothers were.) Horse
Feathers is a brilliant movie, though
Kalmar and Ruby (along with Arthur Sheekman and another recruit, Nat Perrin,
who ultimately went on to produce the TV series The Addams Family in the 1960’s) pushed the plot points even farther
in the Marxes’ next film, Duck Soup
— as if they were in the writers’ room saying to each other, “Hey, what can we
do that’s more outrageous than making Groucho the president of a college? We’ll
make him the president of a whole country! And instead of the bad guy and the bad girl conspiring to steal the
secret football signals, we’ll have them conspire to steal the secret plans of
war! And instead of a football game, we’ll end it with a war!”

Joe Adamson said
of Horse Feathers that its stars
seemed more at home in Animal Crackers (the Marxes’ second film, based on their last Broadway show, and their
most commercially successful film until A Night at the Opera), director Norman Z. McLeod more at home with the
immediately preceding Marx film Monkey Business (which he also helmed), and the writers more at home
with Duck Soup, and he lamented
the way many of the scenes in Horse Feathers ended in perfunctory fade-outs instead of the punchy
comic finishes the writers had actually written (but then much of Adamson’s
book consists of quotes from rejected scenes that never made it before the
cameras, but if they had would have made these marvelously funny movies even
funnier!). Horse Feathers was
made at a time when professional players were recruited by colleges for
supposedly “amateur” student athletics, and while the strategies by which
colleges compensate student athletes have become subtler (the 1977 film One
on One, which cast Robby Benson as a high-school
basketball phenomenon recruited to a major college on an athletic scholarship
and given a sinecure job consisting of watching the automatic sprinklers on the
college grounds turn themselves on and off, is a more current example), the
clash between sports and education dramatized in this movie (and exposed by
Left-wing college student turned author Reed Harris in a 1932 book called King
Football: The Vulgarization of the American College; he’d been expelled from Columbia for writing a magazine article he
eventually expanded into the book, and though he was reinstated and graduated,
and ultimately worked as a journalist and government official, in 1953 he was
forced out of his job with the Voice of America when Senator Joseph McCarthy
cited King Football as evidence
that its author was a Communist with an agenda to destroy American values) is
still very much a part of the American scene. People are still pointing to
college-sports powerhouses like Ohio State, Michigan, Alabama, Stanford, Notre
Dame and USC and asking if they are colleges with sports programs or sports
programs with colleges barely attached.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

On Monday and Tuesday nights Charles and I watched a
compelling two-part PBS documentary called Jackie Robinson, made by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon
and an obvious outgrowth of Ken Burns’ 1994 miniseries Baseball. It’s yet another take on the story of Jackie
Robinson, the first African-American in the 20th century to play
major league baseball (apparently some early teams in the 19th
century had been integrated before Reconstruction finally ended and Jim Crow
segregation hardened into racist orthodoxy and put strict limits, social as
well as legal, on the ability of U.S. whites and Blacks to do just about anything together), which has already generated two narrative
features: The Jackie Robinson Story
(1950), in which Robinson played himself (surprisingly well for a
non-professional actor — he certainly acquitted himself better than the
wretched Joe Louis in his biopic Spirit
of Youth in 1937!) and the young Ruby Dee
played his wife Rachel, and 42,
Brian Helgeland’s great biopic from 2013 which cast the little-known Chadwick
Boseman as Robinson and Nicole Beharie as Rachel. (42 ended up on my short list of baseball movies that
are also great films, along with The Pride of the Yankees, Eight Men
Out and Moneyball.) The first half of Jackie Robinson tells the story most people who’ve heard of Jackie
Robinson at all know: he was born to tenant farmers in Georgia, named Jack
Roosevelt Robinson after Theodore Roosevelt (certainly a more illustrious
presidential namesake than McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters; or
Chester Alan Arthur Burnett, a.k.a. Howlin’ Wolf!), and abandoned by his dad at
age one.

It seems that Sasser, the plantation owner for whom Robinson, Sr.
worked, yielded to Robinson’s entreaties to become a sharecropper instead of
just a tenant farmer (it’s an indication of just how miserable the position of
rural Southern Blacks was at the turn of the last century that he’d actually
regard becoming a sharecropper as an improvement!), only once he started making more money Robinson père started hanging out on “the wrong side of town” and
soon abandoned his family. Robinson’s mom Maddie decided to move herself,
Robinson and his three older siblings (including fellow athlete Mac, who made
the U.S. Olympic team in 1936 and silver-medaled in the 200-meter dash — the
gold medalist was fellow African-American Jesse Owens — only to find when he
got back that the only work he could get was as a street cleaner) to Los
Angeles in the hope that there’d be more opportunities there. She was wrong in
one way — the only work she could
find was as a maid — but right in the sense that she was able to save enough
money to buy a house in Pasadena (and, of course, have to deal with the usual
racist shit from her neighbors) and send her kids to college. Jackie went to a
community college and then to UCLA, where he lettered in four sports — baseball, football, basketball and track —
until the war intervened. Jackie trained with an all-Black Army unit (the U.S.
military wasn’t integrated until Harry Truman did it by executive order in
1948) but didn’t see combat because he got into an altercation with a white bus
driver who wanted him to sit in the back of the bus where he “belonged.” He was
actually court-martialed for this and, while he was acquitted, he was hurt enough
by the experience that he asked for his discharge, and got it. In 1945 he
signed to play professional baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro
Leagues, a team which so dominated Black baseball they were nicknamed “the
Black Yankees,” but he only lasted there one season because — after he and two
other Black players were auditioned by the Boston Red Sox, though none were
signed and they really hadn’t expected to be — he was scouted by the Brooklyn
Dodgers.

The Dodgers were then run by club president Branch Rickey, who wanted
Black players partly because he saw them as an unexploited talent pool that
could bring him victories on the field, and partly because he thought the
Dodgers could sell more tickets to Blacks if there were a few people who looked
like them on the team. Oddly, the Burnses and McMahon don’t include the famous
exchange between Robinson and Rickey that’s depicted in both The
Jackie Robinson Story and 42 — in which Rickey explains that no matter how much
Robinson is taunted, he’s not to retaliate; and when Robinson asks, “You mean
you want someone without the guts to fight back,” Rickey says, “No, I want
someone with the guts not to fight back!” In 1946 Robinson played for the
Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ minor-league farm club, and was well treated by
the audiences in Montreal but got the full-bore racist treatment when he played
on the road, especially in the U.S. South. The crap was all too predictable —
hotel managers who suddenly discovered the reservations the team had made
couldn’t be honored because they were full up; bus drivers and companies who
were suddenly too busy to take the team’s business; restaurants who wouldn’t
serve them — sometimes not even on a take-out basis; and gas stations who
wouldn’t let Robinson use their restroom. Robinson also had to cope with racist
threats from the Ku Klux Klan and free-lance vigilantes, and he also had to
deal with the racism of his teammates, especially when he was called up by the
Dodgers for his first major-league season in 1947. A number of the Dodgers’
white stars, including Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese, were native Southerners
and brought all the racist prejudices they’d grown up with — at one point the
Dodgers decided to give Reese a birthday celebration on the field, and in honor
of his heritage they flew a Confederate flag, which predictably sent Robinson
ballistic — and Snider demanded at the start of 1947 to be traded to another
team rather than play with a Black teammate. Rickey handled him brilliantly; he
told Snider that if he still felt that way by the deadline to make mid-season
trades he would trade him, but by then Snider had seen what Robinson was doing
to the Dodgers on the field and he didn’t want to leave a team that seemed
headed for only its second pennant in its history. (Before Jackie Robinson
joined the Dodgers had made the World Series only once, in 1947; during the 10 years he was on the roster
the Dodgers won the pennant six times and the Series once, in 1955.)

The first
part of Jackie Robinson ends where
the two fiction films about him do — in triumph at the end of the 1947 season —
and the second part tells a deeper, richer and in some ways considerably sadder
story. Robinson was sub-par for 1948 — overweight and, we get the impression,
worn down by the racist taunting and still in the second year of his two-year
promise to Branch Rickey to play the good-boy “credit to his race” and not
fight back or make any public statements supporting civil rights — but rallied
and in 1949 had the best year of his major-league career and was named Most
Valuable Player in the National League — significant not only for the honor
itself but because it was voted by sportswriters, many of whom had
editorialized against Blacks in the major leagues. (One reason it took so long
to integrate major-league baseball was the open, unabashed racism of the first
Commissioner of Baseball, retired judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who’d been
appointed to the job in the wake of the Black Sox scandal of 1919; after his
death in 1944 the next Commissioner was moderate former governor Happy Chandler
— and, though this isn’t mentioned in the movie, his willingness to preside
over the integration of baseball cost him the chance to run for vice-president
in 1968 as George Wallace’s running mate.) Robinson’s remaining career was
plagued by illness (notably the diabetes and heart trouble that plagued him the
rest of his life) and the loss of the speed that had made him one of the
all-time base stealers in baseball history (he stole home plate 19 times and
the show mentioned that he frequently used his speed to score runs without ever
actually hitting the ball himself — he would get to first base on balls,
largely because racist pitchers would throw at him instead of over the plate
and so he’d walk; then he’d get himself into scoring position by stealing
second and another Dodger would send him home on a base hit).

In 1957 the
Dodgers dumped him in a trade onto their hated cross-town rivals, the New York
Giants, and Robinson decided to hang it up and accepted an executive position
with the Chock Full O’Nuts coffee company. By this time he was also taking more
of an open role with the nascent civil rights movement and working with the
NAACP (interestingly this show is one of the few modern sources that actually
acknowledges what that name stands for — National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People), though in 1960 he endorsed Richard Nixon for
President over John F. Kennedy, apparently out of a personal affection for
Nixon as well as the conviction that African-Americans should be part of both major U.S. political parties instead of diminishing
their bargaining power by aligning themselves with just one. Indeed,
historically African-Americans had voted overwhelmingly Republican when they
were allowed to vote at all — their ancestral memories were of the Republicans
as “the party of Lincoln” and the Democrats as the party of secession, “states’
rights,” segregation and the Klan — only that began to change. In 1960 Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Robinson regarded as a personal friend, was
arrested and sentenced to four months on a chain gang — the assumption among
civil-rights supporters was that he would not be allowed to leave that chain
gang alive — and Nixon declined to call his wife Coretta on the ground that
“that would be grandstanding.” Kennedy not only called Coretta, he sent Robert
Kennedy to negotiate and get King’s sentence canceled — and Nixon later
acknowledged that as one of the turning points of the 1960 campaign that had
cost him the election. By 1964 the Democrats, under Kennedy’s successor Lyndon
Johnson, had passed through the sweeping 1964 Civil Rights Act — and Republican
Barry Goldwater had won his party’s nomination (against Robinson’s preferred
candidate, Nelson Rockefeller) and voted against the Civil Rights Act.

Robinson’s last years — he died relatively young, in 1972 at age 53 — were full
of turmoil; he lost his column in the New York Post newspaper (they’d published it in their sports
section but he’d covered mainstream politics and civil rights as well) over his
endorsement of Nixon in 1960; he was attacked by young Black militants,
including Malcolm X, as a sell-out and an “Uncle Tom”; and he had to deal with
trauma at home, particularly his oldest son, Jackie Robinson, Jr., who was a
young, undisciplined teen rebel, then joined the Army in hopes it would teach
him discipline; then got sent to Viet Nam and suffered a major case of
post-traumatic stress disorder when he was wounded on patrol and the two other
servicemembers with him were killed; became addicted to marijuana and opium
while “in country” and heroin when he returned home; finally cleaned up at the
Daytop rehab center; went to work for Daytop after he completed his program —
and was killed in 1971 in a car accident. (The toxicology report on his autopsy
showed no signs of drugs in his system.) Jackie Robinson’s life story — all of it — is an inspiring one but also a saddening
one, and the people the Burnses and McMahon chose to interview included his
widow Rachel (though given her apparent age in the clips I think Rachel’s
interview was done by Ken Burns for his 1994 project Baseball rather than more recently); their surviving kids
Sharon and David; President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle (who, by coincidence,
was born with the last name “Robinson”!); and various African-American writers,
including Gerald Early (who stood out for the crispness and good sense of what
he had to say about Robinson and his odd but important role in the civil-rights
movement). Jackie Robinson is a
fascinating program, and any doubts I might have had as to whether there was
enough drama in Robinson’s life to merit a four-hour treatment were quickly
dispelled — and fortunately the only person with whom the Burnses and McMahon
used their standard approach of having actors read the words of a now-deceased
person as soundtrack voiceovers was Robinson himself, who was voiced by Jamie
Foxx (quite movingly, too). And yet like most biographies of prominent
African-Americans of Robinson’s generation, it’s inspiring in depicting how far
we’ve come and depressing in
terms of its dramatization of the persistence of racism and how far we still
have to go!

Last night Charles and I watched a peculiar presentation on
Turner Classic Movies, an elaborate 2014 documentary on the films of Weimar-era
Germany called From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the
Masses. I had assumed this would be a relatively
normal TCM documentary — narrated in English and with a few film clips
interspersed with a lot of talking heads — instead it was made by Rüdiger
Suchsland (which sounds more like the name of a place than a person — I
couldn’t help but think, “Suchsland, Suchsland, über alles”) and the narration
was in German (they didn’t do what PBS usually does when they show foreign documentaries and have an English
voice-over replace the original). What’s more, the visual content consisted
almost exclusively of film clips, not only from the Weimar-era dramatic films
but from actual newsreels and amateur footage from the same time, and some of
the parallels between what documentarians of the time were recording in the
streets of Berlin and Germany’s other major cities and what fiction filmmakers
were reproducing in the great German studios (between the two World Wars the
German studios were the best-equipped and most technologically advanced in the
world outside of Hollywood) were among the most interesting parts of the film.
The title came from a controversial 1947 book by Siegfried Kracauer, From
Caligari to Hitler, which made the case
that the filmmakers of the Weimar era had consciously or unconsciously
reproduced the conflicts within Germany, psychological and social as well as
political, that ultimately brought the Nazis to power in 1933.

I hadn’t known
much about Kracauer personally but I wasn’t surprised when this film noted that
he was a member of the so-called “Frankfurt School,” a group of Marxist
scholars including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who
essentially attempted to update Marxism to include a critique of mass culture
and an analysis of how the capitalist ruling class used it to inculcate its
values among the masses. I’ve never actually read Kracauer’s book, though I’ve
seen a lot of the major movies of the Weimar era and some of their directors —
notably Fritz Lang, who if I were forced to pick just one would be my all-time
favorite filmmaker, both for the obsessiveness with which he told his story and
the sheer range of his approach (though if I had to pick one movie as the
greatest film of all time it would probably be Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey — I remember my
disappointment when the results of the last Sight and Sound poll of the 10 greatest movies of all time came out
and Hitchcock’s Vertigo had
surpassed Citizen Kane at the top
of the list; I remember thinking that if any movie deserved to chart above Kane it was 2001, and though I love Vertigo
I’d rate at least three other Hitchcock films — Shadow of a Doubt,
Notorious and Strangers on a
Train — ahead of it), as well as the number
of genres in which Lang pioneered
(he was making “Hitchcock movies” before Hitchcock was and James Bond movies
well before Ian Fleming created the character — and, praise by, Suchsland
devoted quite a bit of time to Lang’s 1928 film Spies, which pioneered both the Hitchcock and Bond films; no fewer than three
1930’s British Hitchcock films, The 39 Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage, rip off key sequences or plot points from Spies, and when I saw the complete Spies from Kino Lorber the film came off as less
Hitchcockian and more Bondish than it had in a 90-minute cut version I’d first
seen in the 1970’s). Anyway, Kracauer’s analysis was ridiculed by many of the
surviving filmmakers who had actually worked in Weimar Germany; in his
post-film commentary TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said that Lang had claimed he made
his two-part film Die Nibelungen
in 1923-24 to exalt the German people instead of criticize them, and in his
1965 autobiography Josef von Sternberg said that Kracauer’s claim that the
students who harass their professor in The Blue Angel were the prototypes of the Hitler youth. Sternberg,
a native Austrian who made all but two of his films in the U.S., said that when
he went to Germany to film The Blue Angel in 1930 he’d never heard of the Nazis, and while he was there he ran
into two of their rallies but otherwise had no contact with them. As I
mentioned, virtually this entire film was in German with English subtitles —
though ironically Fritz Lang was represented by a late-1960’s documentary
interview he had filmed in English, and one of the modern-day talking heads,
U.S. professor Eric Weitz, was also shown speaking English. (Presumably he was either subtitled or voice-overed in the original
German release of this documentary.)

If there’s a point to be made for this
documentary, it’s that the cinema of Weimar Germany encompassed far more than
the dark, brooding, atmospheric films most movie buffs think of — Wiene’s The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The
Student of Prague; Lang’s The
Spiders, Destiny (whose German title, Der
Müde Tod, literally translates as Weary
Death), Dr. Mabuse, Die
Nibelungen, Metropolis, M and The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Pabst’s The
Joyless Street, Pandora’s Box, Diary
of a Lost Girl and The Threepenny
Opera, Sternberg’s The Blue Angel — when they think “Weimar German cinema.” It also
encompassed light-hearted musicals with titles like Drei von der
Tankstelle (literally “Three from the Gas
Station”) and The Congress Dances
(a musical about the Congress of Vienna, of all things), many of them starring
Willy Fritsch and Lillian Harvey, who became a superstar team in early German
sound films anticipating Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the U.S. (though
ironically before sound came in Fritsch had been the juvenile male leads in
Lang’s Spies and Woman
in the Moon). There was also a strain of
socially conscious films that came about during what Suchsland called the “New
Sobriety,” the period between the currency reform of 1924 that ended the
hyperinflation and the worldwide depression of 1929, in which (at least
according to him) German cinema moved away from the Expressionism of the Caligari period and became more realistic. One of the
paradigmatic examples was a rarely seen film from 1929 called People
on Sunday, made on a shoestring budget and
self-financed by its illustrious participants, including Robert and Curt
Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Eugen Schuftan and Billy Wilder. (In his 1969
interview in The Celluloid Muse Wilder
— one of the few Celluloid Muse
subjects who was still making movies when he was interviewed for it — recalled,
“We borrowed the money from the uncle of Robert Siodmak, the director. And
Robert was the director for a very simple reason: when kids play football on a
meadow the one who owns the football is the captain, and Robert owned the
camera.”) It anticipated the French New Wave films of three decades later and
was a simple story of two young (straight) couples out and about on a Sunday,
and as Suchsland pointed out it began with a deliberate rejection of movie-star
culture: two of the protagonists are shown messing up publicity photos of Willy
Fritsch and Lillian Harvey.

Suchsland also mentioned that the German Social
Democratic Party had its own filmmaking operation, devoted to making movies
about working-class people in dire straits due to the financial situation —
including one in which an old man commits suicide and the director cuts to a
group of 1-percenters who see the story in the newspaper and wonder why today’s
workers are so weak-willed that they give up so easily. At least one of the
frustrations of a documentary like From Caligari to Hitler is it whets your appetite for long-unavailable or
hard-to-find movies — you’ll see clips from an unfamiliar but
fascinating-looking film and think, “Gee, I’d love to see that!” In this case, the movie I’d most like to see after watching this one is Nerves, made the same year (1919) as Caligari and apparently even more extreme — and effective —
in its stylization. From Caligari to Hitler suffers from the pretentiousness of its theorizing —
Siegfried Kracauer was one of the founders of modern-day “critical theory” and
you can definitely see its roots here (after From Caligari to Hitler Kracauer wrote another book, Theory of
Film, which Pauline Kael ridiculed in her
review, saying that Kracauer couldn’t just enjoy watching Fred Astaire dance
like the rest of us; he had to construct a theory under which Astaire’s work
could be validated in serious intellectual terms) — and certainly a version
with an English-language narration would have been more satisfying to a U.S.
audience, but it’s still an interesting look at one of the most important eras
in any country’s cinematic
history even though, if Douglas Sirk’s 1937 film La Habañera is to be believed, the common assumption that the
Nazi years were an artistic wasteland and German films didn’t start getting
good again until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when a new generation of
directors like Schlondorff (interviewed here), Herzog, Wenders and Fassbinder
emerged and put German cinema back on the international map, is simply not
true.

After From Caligari to Hitler I wanted something considerably lighter, and I ended up screening
Charles the companion piece to The Time of Their Lives on disc eight of the Universal Home Video 14-DVD
boxed set of the complete Abbott and Costello at Universal (which constitutes
28 of their 36 feature-length films): Buck Privates Come Home. As the title suggests, this is a sequel to their
star-making hit from 1941, Buck Privates, which was the highest-grossing box-office hit made in the U.S. that
year (a considerable accomplishment when you consider that was the year of Citizen
Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Sergeant York, How Green Was My Valley, Here Comes
Mr. Jordan and quite a few other
acknowledged masterpieces). The original Buck Privates had been such a mega-hit largely due to its
topicality — it began with newsreel footage of President Franklin Roosevelt
signing the draft bill into law in October 1940 (the first time the U.S. had
ever had a draft in peacetime) and showed Abbott and Costello as ultra-raw
recruits who join the Army by accident and, of course, spend several reels picturesquely
screwing up. In this sequel, set in the year it was made — 1947 — Abbott and
Costello play the same characters, “Slicker” Smith (Bud Abbott) and Herbie
Brown (Lou Costello), who have somehow survived the war in Europe and, after a
six-minute prologue of clips from the original Buck Privates (including the famous screwed-up drill sequence that
Abbott and Costello largely improvised on set, and which during the war was
included in a Japanese propaganda film aimed at their servicemembers to show that ours weren’t so
dangerous) we meet them on a troop transport going home.

The
about-to-be-discharged men are singing a song called “We’re Going Home” — which
later gets parodied at various points (the Andrews Sisters, who provided such
appealing musical numbers as USO entertainers in the original Buck
Privates, are sorely missed here) — only
when Abbott and Costello finally get home the only career they have to go back
to is their old one of selling bootleg ties on the streets of New York. Alas,
their old nemesis as both police officer before the war and drill sergeant
during it, Collins (Nat Pendleton, in his final film), got back his old job as a cop and is soon chasing them. The film
is mostly a brilliant set of comedy sequences instead of a coherent story, but
to the extent the movie has a
plot it’s about Abbott’s and Costello’s attempts to keep a French war orphan,
Evey LeBrec (Beverly Simmons — they could have come up with a more appealing
French character name for her, but Simmons is refreshingly unsentimental and
un-Shirley Temple-ish at a time when, though Temple herself had aged out of kid
roles, her example had set the template for the depiction of virtually all movie children), in the U.S. rather than let her be
deported back to France, where she’d end up in an orphanage because she has no
family members left. They’re aided in this by aspiring race-car driver and
designer Bill Gregory (the almost terminally dull Tom Brown) and his
girlfriend, Lt. Sylvia Hunter (Joan Fulton, a.k.a. Joan Shawlee and a
considerably spunkier and more appealing heroine than usually got cast in roles
like this), whom Our Heroes met on the boat coming home and who agreed to take
charge of Evey until she could be sent back to France.

The big comic scenes
include one in which Costello accidentally sets off a booby-trapped grenade
(it’s concealed inside a camera) and has to throw it out of a porthole on board
ship so it will explode harmlessly in the water; one in which a banquet table
that was supposed to be supported by two sawhorses but in fact has only one
under it (Costello mistakenly took the other away) is precariously balanced and
ends up propelling a cake, slingshot-style, into Nat Pendleton’s face; one in
which Costello becomes the target in a game of tug-of-war between Abbott and a
jealous man on the other end of a tenement block who accuses Costello of
messing with his wife — Costello is on a blanket he suspended from a
clothesline to make a D.I.Y. hammock and, after a restful night’s sleep, he
awakens and suddenly realizes he’s suspended over an alley several floors below
— and a great slapstick chase scene in which Costello is at the wheel of
Gregory’s super-car, driving it down city streets, in and out of buildings, and
at one point ending up with an advertising billboard around his neck whose
broad, flat surface generates enough lift that he at least briefly flies. (The
special effects in these scenes are excellent and completely convincing, a far
cry from the abysmal process work that marred several similar chase scenes in
Laurel and Hardy’s movies at Hal Roach Studios in the early 1930’s.) There’s
even a marvelous scene in which Costello gets to enact his heartbreak at being
about to lose Evey to the government bureaucracy that insists she has to be
sent back — a flash of the sort of pathos that, if they’d pursued it more,
would have made Abbott and Costello even greater than they were. Buck
Privates Come Home is a sure-fire laugh
machine, lacking the richness of The Time of Their Lives (which had been a box-office flop) but at least
allowing us to see Abbott and Costello truly work as a team again — apparently
they’d settled the feud that had left them refusing to speak together during
the production of Little Giant
and The Time of Their Lives
unless they were acting a scene together, and had forced the writers of those
films to accommodate them by giving them as few scenes together as possible!

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

First up on KPBS last night was a quirky show called 10 Parks That Changed
America, which turned out to be an episode
from a series produced by WTTV, PBS’s afflilate in Chicago, called 10
_____ That Changed America (the other
entries were “Buildings,” “Homes” and “Towns”). In some ways the most fascinating
segment of the show was the first, which depicted James Oglethorpe’s master
plan for Savannah, Georgia in 1732. He was hoping that the colony would become
a model community, and to that end he made slavery illegal (a decision that,
alas, was reversed just 18 years later!), and laid out the city so each block
would essentially be its own neighborhood mini-city (and urban planners today
think the “city of villages” concept is so new and innovative!), complete with
public buildings, residences and a town square in the middle. The other parks
profiled — in chronological order, which was nice — were Fairmount Park in
Philadelphia (which was actually part of an integrated water supply to keep the
residents from getting yellow fever — at the time it wasn’t known that the
disease was spread by mosquitoes but the ruling theory that it was spread by
“bad air” from stagnant water at least was close enough to the truth the city
did some of the right things,
including setting up the city so it would get its water from the Schuylkill
River and the water would flow continuously, get itself pumped up by steam and
then be transported by gravity to its end users); Mt. Auburn Cemetery in
Boston; Central Park in New York (of course!), the Neighborhood Parks that dot
Chicago (well, the producers of this show had to do something that was in their home town!), the San Antonio River
Walk (created in response to a 1921 river flood that wiped out a good part of
San Antonio’s downtown and killed 50 people; it was a series of dams and
floodgates that would keep the river level within the city limits so businesses
could locate on the banks and people could walk from one restaurant or shop to
another), Overton Park in Memphis, Tennessee (though the story was less about
its original creation than the efforts of residents in 1971 to save it from
being bisected by an interstate freeway), Freeway Park in Seattle (where
residents had lost a battle
against a freeway and decided to make lemonade out of the lemons by building a
park on top of the freeway), Gas
Works Park (also in Seattle, in which the city took an abandoned gas works,
reprocessed the toxic sludge left behind so it could be used for planting, and
created a park but with the principal features of the gas works left behind as
a sort of memorial to America’s industrial past), and the High Line (the
abandoned elevated train tracks in New York City that were also turned into a
“found” park!).

Sunday, April 10, 2016

I turned on the Lifetime
“world premiere” movie aired last night, The Cheerleader Murders. Overall it was another case of a genuinely
talented Lifetime director (David Jackson) doing the best he could with a
teminally silly Lifetime script (by Matt Young). It opens with a powerfully
Gothic scene in which Ellie Fuller (Samantha Boscarino, nice-looking and
appropriately spunky for the role but with the annoying habit of seemingly
changing her hairdo in each scene) tells us via voice-over narration that she
feels she is cursed, that she’s under an evil spell and takes it with her
everywhere she goes. It all began, she says, when she was a freshman
(freshperson?) in high school and her older sister, a senior, broke up with her
boyfriend — only her boyfriend wasn’t about to take no for an answer. Instead
he came to her family’s home with a shotgun, killed her sister (he pulled aside
the shower curtain and cornered her in the shower like Norman Bates in
Hitchcock’s Psycho, a scene I would be quite
happy never to see a visual quote from
again) and for good measure killed their dad when he tried to intervene. Now
she and her mom (who for some reason Matt Young never explains were spared the
bloodbath) are living in a different city, it’s “Three Years Later” (as a typical Lifetime subtitle tells
us), and she’s now a senior herself. She’s also got a hot boyfriend named
Nicholas (Austin Lyon, who wouldn’t be bad casting for a biopic of Elvis if
anyone really feels a need out there to
make another biopic of Elvis), son of the San Vicente High School football
team’s coach Dan Reeves (Henderson Wade, considerably less hunky than his
on-screen son but at least close enough in appearance we can believe they’re
genetically related). Ellie’s mom (Michelle Fuller, who likewise looks enough
like an older version of Samantha Boscarino we can believe in them as mother
and daughter) encourages her to get out more and in particular to attend a
study party given by her friends and fellow San Vicente cheerleaders Morgan
(Hannah Kasulka) and Dee (Amanda Leighton), though predictably the three girls
do much more gossiping than studying, and when Morgan makes a slighting remark
about Ellie not having a (living) father, Ellie gets insulted and leaves for
home. It’s a lucky thing for her, too, because the next thing that happens is a
mysterious intruder comes to Morgan’s home, kills her (and subsequently severs
a head and arm and dumps them in a site where a ditch is being dug — presumably
to provide water for a large farm, since this is set in California’s Central
Valley and a large orchard is a key setting for two of the action scenes) and
kidnaps Dee.

The exact credentials of the law enforcement officials who respond
to the murder are unclear, since the sign on the office door says “San Vicente
Police Department” but the cars the cops use and the insignia on their uniforms
identify them as sheriff’s deputies (which under California law means either
San Vicente is unincorporated and directly governed by its county, or it’s a
city that contracted with its county’s sheriff for law enforcement services),
and to make it even more confusing, sitting in on the investigation led by the
local sheriff, police chief or whatever he is (the imdb.com site is unclear as
to who plays this role — it does identify Juan Rodriguez as “Cop” — but he’s the typical avuncular
African-American Lifetime’s casting people like in roles like this, though he’s
light enough he could be
part-Latino) is an FBI agent, Ramon Martinez (David DeSantos), who’s twitchy
enough that we at least briefly believe he might be the killer. The filmmakers throw us quite a few red herrings
as the story goes on, including unpopular student Ben (Davin Crittenden, who
looked reasonably cute to me but whom we were supposed to see as the school’s
wallflower — and there’s a great scene in which Ellie goes to his house and his
mom is a skinny, slatternly, rude piece of work even more screwed-up than her
son), who writes Ellie a threatening note and puts it in her locker but is not responsible for the even more threatening texts
she gets; and a homeless guy who comes upon Ellie as she’s mourning at the
improvised memorial set up for Morgan where her body (or bits of it, at least)
was found, but it’s not hard to figure out that Coach Dan Reeves is really a
killer (and after the recent revelations that former House Speaker Dennis
Hastert molested at least four male students during his days as a high-school teacher and wrestling coach,
it wasn’t hard to believe in a story about a villainous coach). At one point
Dan actually frames his son — Ellie’s boyfriend Nicholas — for the crimes, and
Nicholas responds by slashing his wrists in his cell and committing suicide
once he’s arrested.

Then Ellie gets trapped on Dan’s farm — where she’d already
gone to try to rescue Dee, and she managed to get her out of there but Dan,
clad in a hoodie and face mask that made him unrecognizable, got to her and
knifed her as she was trying to get into Ellie’s car — and in the final action
scene Dan is about to kill Ellie when her mom, of all people, drives up and
accidentally but helpfully runs into him and kills him, saving her daughter’s
life and sparing the cops the seemingly onerous task of proving his guilt in
court. (Mater ex machina.) There are all too many instances of the normally level-headed Ellie
tearing off after the bad guy (or whom she thinks is the bad guy at the moment) in court instead of
doing the sensible non-movie thing of reporting her information to the police,
and so many gaping plot holes in Matt Young’s construction the movie approaches
unbelievability and frequently goes over, but for all his borrowings from
Hitchcock (it’s clear from those farm scenes he’s seen North by Northwest) he’s a quite good suspense director and also has
a real flair for the Gothic. Much of the movie takes place at night and manages
a convincing noir atmosphere despite the
color and the outdoor settings — and cinematographer Denis Maloney helps
Jackson’s cause by giving us a rich and vibrant palette instead of making
everything dirty green or brown. But Jackson’s good work is sabotaged by a
silly script whose writer seems more intent on giving Lifetime’s audience the
clichés it’s used to instead of telling a coherent and genuinely thrilling and
scary story — sort of like that bizarre speech Sarah Palin gave for Donald
Trump in Wisconsin, in which she seemed so intent on giving the audience all
her and Trump’s talking points she didn’t bother with that annoying task of
trying to connect them into a coherent presentation. (At one point she just
shouted, “Reagan!,” and got the response she wanted out of an audience of
people already conditioned to regard the 40th president as a paragon
of intelligence, dedication and virtue.)

After The Cheerleader Murders I kinda-sorta wanted to watch the next movie on Lifetime — a rerun
from 2014 called Stalked by My Neighbor (I hadn’t realized from Stalked by My Doctor that it’s part of yet another Lifetime title series,
“Stalked by My _____,” to go along with “The Perfect _____,” “The _____ S/he
Met Online,” and “_____ at 17”) — but I didn’t really want to subject Charles
to it and, when I found that Christine Conradt was not the writer (Stalked by My Neighbor was written by its director, Doug Campbell), I told
Charles that we could watch something else if he wanted to. To my surprise, he
asked if we could break open the Abbott and Costello boxed set from Universal
that contained the 28 feature films they made there between 1940 and 1955 (all
but eight of their total output) and pick it up where we’d left off. We’d left
off at the 1946 film Little Giant,
made during a time when Abbott and Costello were so blatantly feuding with each
other they literally would not
talk to each other when they weren’t actually doing a scene together — and
their writers were accommodating them by giving them scripts that gave them as
few scenes together as possible. The next film in their output was The
Time of Their Lives, probably the downright
weirdest movie in the Abbott and
Costello oeuvre, a ghost story
(after the sensational successes of the British film Dead of Night and Paramount’s The Uninvited in 1944 ghost stories were hot properties, quite
likely because it was late in World War II and wartime always seems to inspire
people to believe their dead loved ones still survive in some other plane of
existence) which begins in upstate New York in 1780. The prologue, which takes
up 23 minutes of this 80-minute movie, is set on the estate of Thomas Danbury
(Jess Barker), who is ostensibly an American patriot but secretly is part of
the British plot in which Benedict Arnold turned traitor and arranged to
surrender the fort at West Point to British major John André. Danbury is
engaged to marry Melody Allen (Marjorie Reynolds, borrowed from Paramount),
while Danbury’s maid Nora O’Leary (Ann Gillis) is being courted by Danbury’s
British-symp manservant Cuthbert Greenway (Bud Abbott) but loves free-lance
tinker Horatio Prim (Lou Costello, who for some reason is the only one of these
people who actually looks credible in 18th Century drag). In order
to get his rival out of the way, Greenway locks Prim in a trunk from which Nora
frees him, and Prim proudly boasts that he’s received a letter of commendation
from General George Washington saying that his skills as a tinker have been
invaluable to the Revolutionary cause.

Then Prim and Melody overhear Danbury and
two fellow conspirators talking about Arnold’s plot, and rush to get to
Washington and warn him — only Washington and his men learn about the plot from
other sources, so when Prim and Melody are being chased by Continental Army
soldiers, they assume they’re Brits and fire on them. They’re killed by the
Continentals and their bodies are thrown into a well on the Danbury estate, and
a curse is put upon them that they must remain on the Danbury grounds “until
the crack of doom” unless some evidence comes to light that proves they weren’t traitors. Then the patriots burn down the Danbury
mansion and leave the property a burnt-out wreck. The director, Charles Barton,
and his writers (Val Burton, who also produced; Walter DeLeon; and Bradford
Ropes, a surprising name to see here since his most famous credit is writing
the source novel for 42nd Street, with Abbott and Costello writer John Grant given
credit for “special material”) gives us a clever montage scene showing various
generations of lovers having carved their initials and the dates of their
comings-together on trees on what’s left of the Danbury estate, a clever and
economical way of moving us up from 1780 to the film’s 1946 present.
Antiquarian Sheldon Gage (John Shelton) has bought the Danbury property and
rebuilt the old house as close as he could come to what it was like in the old
days — though at least he’s installed electric lights and telephones — and he’s
collected as much of Danbury’s original furniture as he could (we were told
during the prologue that it was looted by the Continental Army before they set
fire to the house) and built replicas of the pieces he couldn’t acquire. He’s
brought along some houseguests, including his fiancée Mildred Dean (Binnie
Barnes), her friend June Prescott (Lynn Baggett), spiritualist medium Emily
(Gale Sondergaard) and psychotherapist Dr. Ralph Greenway (Bud Abbott), who’s
supposed to be a direct descendant, six generations removed, of Cuthbert
Greenway, the manservant who gave Horatio such a hard time way back when.
(Though the writers had quite a few possibilities in bringing back actors from
the prologue and having them play their descendants in the picture’s modern
portions, the only one they did that with was Abbott.)

The film then becomes a
clever and amusing spoof of spiritualism, with the modern characters using
Thomas Danbury’s published memoirs (in which he apologized for his disloyalty
and swore allegiance to the U.S.) and a séance led by Emily, to attract the
ghosts and find out the whereabouts of George Washington’s letter to Horatio,
the evidence he and Melody need to be able to leave the property and ascend to
heaven at long last. It turns out Danbury hid it inside a combination-locked
clock, but that piece isn’t in the reconstructed estate — it’s in a New York
museum of Revolutionary War artifacts, from which Dr. Greenway, psychologically
compelled to atone for the sins of his ancestor, steals it. The Time
of Their Lives is a major outlier in the
works of Abbott and Costello, not only because over one-fourth of it takes
place in the 1780’s but because the gags are more subtle and less out-and-out
funny than usual, and for once both
Abbott and Costello are given multidimensional characters and actually have to act instead of just standing up and telling jokes. A lot
of the jokes center around the ghosts and their oddly assorted powers — they
can’t be seen by the living people, nor can they talk to them directly, though
they can manipulate physical objects (including tapping the table at which the
séance is being held, rapping once for “no” and twice for “yes”), wear clothes
(the sight of Marjorie Reynolds wearing one of Binnie Barnes’ dresses and with
her unclad parts invisible — done with the same velvet-wrapping technique
Universal used in its Invisible Man movies — is one of the film’s funniest and
most spectacular gags) and make noises. They can also switch electric lights on
and off (when Horatio first encounters electric lights he says, “Amazing...
must’ve got it from Benjamin Franklin. He’s always inventing things”), answer
phones and turn on radios — and naturally, not having experienced any of these things before, they’re flabbergasted at
lights coming on without being set on fire first, voices coming out of gizmos
attached to wires, and both voices and gunshots (when they turn on the radio a
gangster program is being broadcast) coming out of a cabinet.

Another amazing
gag is the scene in which Lou Costello and Marjorie Reynolds run through each other and, being ghosts, aren’t harmed — except
each ends up wearing the other’s clothes (no doubt infinitely expansive so hers
can blow up to his size and his can shrink to hers), and have to do it again to
restore themselves to their proper genders. (“I’m a boy!” Costello whines in
his trademark whine, which makes it somewhat a matter of opinion.) There are
also clever in-jokes, including Mildred’s remark when she sees Emily, “Didn’t I
see you in Rebecca?” (she almost
did: Gale Sondergaard was indeed considered for Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, though Judith Anderson was ultimately cast), and an
oddball quote of Lauren Bacall’s famous line, “You know how to whistle, don’t
you?,” from To Have and Have Not
a year before. The Time of Their Lives is a surprisingly sophisticated comedy, especially considering who the
stars are, beautifully directed by Barton — many of the scenes have the Gothic
look of a classic Universal horror film (and no doubt some of the sets were
recycled from the Universal horror movies) — and a real oddball of a film. It’s
also the last Abbott and Costello film that went out under the 1937-1946
star-mobile Universal logo; right after it Universal merged with Sam Spiegel’s
International Pictures to form Universal-International, and all the remaining
films Abbott and Costello made under their contract went out as
Universal-International productions. The Time of Their Lives was a box-office flop (the original trailer,
included as a bonus item on the DVD, made it clear how desperate Universal’s
marketing department was to sell such a “different” film — they ultimately
advertised it as “Something New … from Bud and Lou!,” which it was) and so it’s
not surprising that for their next production the “suits” at
Universal-International swung for the fences and concocted something called Buck
Privates Come Home, a postwar sequel to
their 1947 star-making hit.